Veijo Rönkkönen’s Sculpture Park

In the Finnish town of Parikalla, close to the Russian border, is a remarkable sculpture park consisting of some five hundred concrete figures that were all sculpted by the late Veijo Rönkkönen, a humble press worker and an artist with extraordinary dedication.

Veijo Rönkkönen was only 16 years old when he started working on his park. Veijo had recently got a job as a press worker in a paper mill in his hometown Parikkala, a job he held for 41 years. With his first pay check, he purchased ten apple tree seedlings and a bag of concrete to create a garden around his family home. For the next fifty years, until his death in 2010, he dedicated all his spare time and money planting flowers and trees and creating hundreds of caricature-like sculptures, mostly of full scale human figures.